Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano

Re:Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano by sliken on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @06:37PM (#15597242)

On what terms? Sure many trees, plants, animals, and humans will die in a super volcano eruption. But the resulting ash will help enrich the soil for a decent fraction of the entire country. There will be a huge carbon sink as entire forests are buried in ash, soil will receive additional minerals, and a light loamy soil will result. California for instance has excellent soil (class A good enough for even more challenging crops like strawberries) because of a large previous eruption.

So sure in the short term (years) no eruption is good. But in the long term there will be poorer soil, or a huge amount of energy/chemicals consumed to keep the soil usable.

It's far from clear that it's better for the ecosystem to stop a volcano (or supervolcano). What's next stopping earthquakes? Keep plates from moving? Stopping erosion? Preventing rivers from migrating?

Mucking with nature to prevent the natural cycle of life has gone pretty poorly so far. Floods are getting worse, rivers are moving faster, coastal cities are losing their marshes, cities on rivers are at a higher risk than ever of flooding.

Check out the updates on Mt Saint Helens area in the post eruption documentary. It's quite vibrant and recovered much faster than scientist expected.

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Re:Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano by diego_moita on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @07:00PM (#15597385)

There are 2 big flaws in your argumentation:

1) Tell humans their suffering doesn't matter.

2) A super-volcano eruption is several orders of magnitude worse than St. Helens, a scale that human history has not seen yet. It would affect the whole planet and wreck ecosystems in the whole planet, far beyond North America. We're talking about likely end of civilization. You don't have logic against that.

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Re:Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano by Bluestrike2 on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @11:14PM (#15598574)

The ejecta volume from Yellowstone supervolcano erupting would be three orders of magnitude greater than Mount St. Helens (~1,000km^3 compared to ~1k^3). The force of its first and largest eruption was about ~2,000 times greater as well. They're not comparable in any sense of the word. Recovery for much of the US's ecosystem would be measured in centuries, or more likely, millennia.

As for the comparison to climate change, it's flawed on its face. Climate change wasn't exactly planned. There's a difference between that sort of change and a focused, targeted effort to change a particular element of nature (in this case, cooling a supervolcano) and an unintentional consequence of industrialization.

In any case, any effort to roll back the effects of climate change is going to involve some form of climate engineering. That could include anything from artificial carbon sequestration to a massive solar dust shade at L1 blocking a small fraction of solar radiation to give us the time needed to implement those sequestration systems. Or any number of other proposals. Should we just accept higher temperatures instead, even if we manage to slow or even halt the progression? We muck with nature all the time, and we're going to have to continue to do so in order to protect it.

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Re:Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano by PhasmaFelis on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @03:47AM (#15599463)

Do you understand that tens of millions of people will probably starve to death in the volcanic winter following a Yellowstone eruption?

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Re:Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano by sliken on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @05:20PM (#15605574)

The answer to starvation is is to store food now. Seems kinda silly to have huge strategic oil reserves, and not food reserves.

After all there are many potential causes of food shortages and the risks are getting worse with each year because of additional pollution, global warming, and increased population.

I don't want anyone to die, but does seem short sighted to depend on soil enriched by previous eruptions, then to prevent future ones.

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Re:Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano by PhasmaFelis on Thursday November 02, 2017 @11:03PM (#15616394)

> The answer to starvation is is to store food now.

Or, maybe, we could prevent it all from happening in the first place.

I don't understand why you're so stuck on not preventing mass death. Did you not think this through before commenting and now your ego won't let you back down? Or are you just trolling?

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Re:Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano by KozmoNau7 on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @05:22AM (#15599755)

That is possibly even a rather low estimate. The sheer amount of ejecta and ash will quite literally blanket the Earth.

It would make for a good story premise for a movie/TV show/video game, but not so much fun to actually live through.

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Re:Nasa’s ambitious plan to save Earth from a supervolcano by sliken on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @05:28PM (#15605627)

Soil world wide is decreasing in quality. Wasteful farming practices, slash and burn farming, erosion, monoculture farming, heavy pesticide use, making pesticide resistant crops so you can use more pesticide, etc.

Seems far from sure that a world wide cloud of ash might well do more benefit (better soil, cooler temperatures, helping dead zones in the ocean) than harm.... assuming we plan for it.

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